What is abolition?

As the 2020 uprisings continue to radicalize many, we welcome everyone thinking about abolition for the first time.

What exactly is abolition? The abolitionist tradition in the United States is storied. The first enslaved Africans were smuggled to the United States in 1619. Although not all abolitionists were anti-racist, a small group of dissenters including David Walker, John Brown, Frederick Douglass, Harriott Tubman, Sojourner Truth, and their like, sought to end the institution of chattel slavery. In order to justify Because the AmeriKKKan “criminal” punishment system is a racial-capitalist extension of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, contemporary abolitionists seek to abolish the material Moreover, although like any other field, philosophies vary, abolition is about using the resources currently funding the bloated carceral landscape to creating new institutions

Although abolitionists outrightly seek to destroy to destroy carceral structures and networks, that is the beginning of abolitionist work. Abolitionists are, at bottom, concerned with Justice. When I tell people that my goal is not to arrest police officers and put them in prison to hold them accountable, but “abolish the police” entirely, most immediate imagine the current social world with the removal of police instead of an entirely different world teeming with possibility. The carceral cannot provide Justice, thus abolitionists strive to build robust networks of mutual aid, violence prevention, public health, residential, and economic frameworks that fulfill community members material needs. The idea of abolition is not, as Ruth Wilson Gilmore suggests, to abolish police and prisons, but to abolish the social world by which carceral logics apply.

Below, find a plethora of resources to begin to radicalize you toward Justice.